This is a special edition of the biweekly distribution of information about the sales and installations of publishing technology and the latest news on new products developed by suppliers to the industry.

These missives are archived on the World-Wide Web at http://colegroup.com/NW/. To get removed from this list, send e-mail to: macjordomo@colegroup.com with the words UNSUBSCRIBE NEWSWIRE as the first line of the text.

To submit material for consideration, please deliver electronically to news@colegroup.com.

In a departure from the conventional wisdom of its previous two owners, Atex Publishing Systems Corp. of Bedford, Mass., has announced it will provide users of older J11-based systems with upgrades to the board that holds the system's central processing unit.

Atex, 51 percent controlled by Sysdeco Group AS of Norway, made the announcement at the mid-September meeting of its users group in Chicago.

The J11 computer -- based on designs from Digital Equipment Corp.'s PDP-11, which was created in the late 1960s -- has been the mainstay of the hundreds of Atex installations worldwide. Because Atex made so many modifications to the PDP-11, the system was unable to migrate to later designs of the PDP.

The two owners of Atex previous to Sysdeco had effectively said the J11 hardware was not capable of being upgraded, then developed a strategy called "New Front End," which eventually became a product called Deadline.

Sysdeco abandoned Deadline when it took over the company earlier this year. Now it sells an editorial front-end called DewarView, from Dewar Information Systems Corp. of Downers Grove, Ill. Sysdeco acquired Dewar last month (see THE COLE PAPERS, September 1995).

The new Atex board and software -- called the RTC-J11 or the R5 CPU -- was introduced because of recent developments in disk drives.

For the last few years, Atex has been selling "minifarms" of small, SCSI-controlled disk drives. These drives sped up J11-based systems to the point that "normal system operations, historically spindle-bound, become CPU-limited after a minifarm upgrade," the company said in a handout to users.

"As new functions are added, such as EdPage, ClassPag [RS/6000-based editorial and classified pagination systems], or Press2Go [Quark XPress-based pagination]," said the handout, "the demands on the Atex-11 become greater, resulting in varying degrees of performance degradation.

"For example," the handout continued, "a single EdPage station is as taxing to the CPU as three active users."

The new RTC-J11 will speed up performance by providing: